Biden, Trump argue over immigration policy in Atlanta debate – Nebraska Examiner

Immigration is taking center stage in the 2024 presidential campaign and was also the focus of the first presidential debate Thursday night between President Joe Biden and presumptive GOP nominee Donald J. Trump.

Immigration is a major issue for voters and for Trump, as the Biden administration struggles to manage the highest number of migrant encounters at the southern border in 20 years.

During the 90-minute debate on CNN in Atlanta, Biden defended his administration’s handling of immigration and accused Trump of derailing a bipartisan border security deal reached between the U.S. Senate and the U.S. Senate.

Biden also highlighted the deal as a reason he should be re-elected, because the White House was able to forge the deal in the first place.

“We worked very hard to reach a bipartisan agreement,” Biden said.

Immigration crackdown

Senate Republicans rejected the bipartisan border security deal earlier this year, siding with their House colleagues and Trump. The deal would have significantly overhauled U.S. immigration law by creating a temporary procedure to close the border during busy times and raising the bar for asylum applications.

During the debate, Trump claimed that Biden did not need legislation to implement policy changes at the southern border because “I didn’t have legislation, I said close the border.”

In early June, Biden launched the most drastic crackdown on immigration of his administration, issuing an executive order instituting a partial ban on asylum procedures at the southern border.

Trump called the action “insignificant.”

The debate came a day after Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas spoke from Tucson, Arizona, about the decline in migrant encounters following Biden’s executive order.

He said the Tucson sector has “seen a more than 45 percent drop in encounters with the U.S. Border Patrol since the president took action, and repatriations of people encountered in Tucson have increased by nearly 150 percent.”

“Across the entire southern border, encounters with Border Patrol have decreased by more than 40 percent,” Mayorkas said.

“Remain in Mexico” policy

Trump cited past policies he believed were effective and criticized Biden for reversing them, such as one that required migrants to remain in Mexico while they await asylum.

Biden criticized Trump’s “zero tolerance” policy of separating parents from their children in an effort to deter undocumented immigrants at the border.

“When he was president, he … separated babies from their mothers and put them in cages,” Biden said.

And, without citing evidence, Trump blamed immigrants for the crime, calling it “migrant crime.”

Overall, violent crime in the country has decreased by 15 percent, according to recent FBI statistics, and researchers have found that immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than U.S. citizens.

Trump addressed the death of Georgia nursing student Laken Riley and blamed Biden’s immigration policies.

“All he does is make our country unsafe,” Trump said.

In late February, Riley, a 22-year-old nursing student at Augusta University, was reported missing by her roommate after she failed to return home from an errand on the University of Georgia campus in Athens.

Local police found her body and soon after arrested a 26-year-old man from Venezuela for her murder – an immigrant previously arrested in Georgia for shoplifting and entering the country without authorization in 2022, according to the US service Immigration and Customs Enforcement. In response, Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives passed the Laken Riley Act.

Mass deportations

Debate moderators asked Trump how he would carry out mass deportations, but he did not go into detail.

He has repeatedly said he would carry out a mass deportation campaign against undocumented immigrants, using local law enforcement, the National Guard and potentially the U.S. military. He did so on the campaign trail and in a lengthy interview with Time Magazine.

“We have to get a lot of these people out and we have to do it quickly because they are destroying our country,” Trump said during the debate.